


The Empty Name

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: Backstory, Betrayal, Canon Era, Crueltide, Disembowelment, Face Slapping, Father-Son Relationship, Implied/Referenced Underage, Japanese Culture, Knighthood Ceremony, Loyalty, M/M, Mild D/s, Non-Chronological, Teacher-Student Relationship, Threats of Corporal Punishment, Torture, War, Yuletide, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-13
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-02-28 02:28:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2715566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>His inner organs are formed of ice, floating in icy waters. It is not the ice of fear. There will be no savage blast of hope to thaw it, not ever.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>What there will be is retribution.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Empty Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [undomielregina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/undomielregina/gifts).



White gravel crunches under the soles of his well-shined shoes and under those of a dozen more shoes in his wake. The needles of the _sugi_ that tower far above their heads charge the air with their bracing smell, as they do everywhere in his country. They always will, until the day the earth beneath them heaves up and the gods themselves laugh at the lines men have drawn on the land.

Here, the robust scent of the evergreen entwines with the far more ethereal one of roses. The Deputy Minister of Home Affairs reaches out and snaps one off its stem, not brushing so much as a fingertip against a thorn. His lips part, and out spill the words of a Westerner: _“All we have left of the original rose is the empty name of the blooms that remain.”_

Under his nose, the bloom in his glove gives up its scent in full. Sweet, but not cloying. Powerful. Pure.

“As one would expect of you, Katsuragi- _dono,”_ Oe says, touching the brim of his hat. “The most cultured scion of nobility, the guardian of our country’s culture, is himself a poet. Inspired by nothing more than a flower.”

The Deputy Minister chuckles. His fist tightens around the severed blossom.

“The poet of that verse is dead. Nearly eight hundred years dead,” he says, letting the petals trail from his glove as he begins to move forward again. He continues to smile vaguely — seldom does he not wear that smile; it is a most useful expression — but, just for a moment, he lets his gaze drift inward. “To think we’ve lost that knowledge, as well. My people, too, have come to ruin.”

His staff follow him silently, saying nothing. Of course they would say nothing, and not simply out of respect and deference, though he can’t fault them on those counts. Clever, useful, (reasonably) trustworthy men, and not a one of them more cultured than the roughest clod-digger.

In all his years, years that have touched his face but lightly, he has met very few men who were anything but. And first among them was a man not of his country.

It had all been such a damned waste.

_Katsuragi is thirteen years old. He stands on the main path in the largest of his father’s gardens, head tilted back, purple petals caressing his face as they float to the ground._

_For each of the Eight Branch Families, there is an emblematic flower. House Reizen has its rose; House Tachibana, its wild orange blossom; other houses claim the blossom of the plum or cherry or hydrangea. The flower of House Katsuragi is the wisteria. Kin to the humble pea, it thrives in moist black loam but will grow well enough in meaner soils. It was the insignia of a powerful ancient clan; it is the comfort of holy men. It is a towering glory of color and fragrance; it is a dragon of a plant that will tear lattices, crush posts, and choke the life out of the large trees around which it coils._

_Well before the age of thirteen, a young master of House Katsuragi will have learned these things, as a monk has learned his mantra._

_The garden path is so littered with wisteria petals on this bright, warm day that, at first, even one so attentive as the current young master does not immediately pick up on the sound of approaching footfalls. When he finally hears them, he lowers his head — but not all the way, not at least until he sees who comes near._

_The sun makes a golden fire of the newcomer’s hair, and his eyes are the color of the boundless heavens above. Katsuragi has registered these things perhaps half a second before he’s registered the fact that this man is of the West. Has he carried the setting sun with him as a gift, hauling it back from the horizon to make this long, lush spring day even longer?_

_The stranger is tall, as if to better draw down that sun. He wears the long coat, waistcoat, and tie that mark a gentleman from one end of the continent to another, though Katsuragi’s elders of only a few generations gone would have scorned such attire as foreign. His broad shoulders fill the outer coat … Katsuragi does not understand why they do so pleasingly, but they do; so, too, does the tight nip of the garments at the stranger’s waist make the boy’s breath short in an oddly heady way._

_The man stops half a meter from Katsuragi. He bends forward at that strangely… pretty waist. The bow is not quite the Eastern gesture of humility; it is, Katsuragi intuits, an attempt to make the two of them more equal. With a smile, the Westerner extends a long, elegant hand, palm upward._

_“It is my honor to make your acquaintance,_ waka-sama,” _he says in a voice that infuses the luxuriant trees above them and the petal-strewn ground below them with the honey-like light of a summer evening. “I am called Ashley, and your estimable father has taken me on as your tutor.”_

 _Katsuragi’s chest expands with a bright heat, as if it were a sky lantern. He does not understand why his father would do such a thing for him, but he does not waste his energy pondering it. He smiles at his new tutor for the first time, the easy, neutral smile that, he is learning, has many uses. Then he clasps Ashley’s hand, which dwarfs his own, and says, “The honor is all mine,_ sensei.” __

The young masters of House Tachibana took their schooling on the third floor in a little-used wing of the family’s winter residence. The corridor was dark paneled, dim lit, dusty. Katsuragi pressed his back to the wall between two high bookcases and stood motionless, listening to snatches of speech from behind the heavy door at the hallway’s end. A pleasant tenor voice, swaying in the rhythms of instruction; the occasional answer in a higher-pitched one that, despite the speaker’s age, was modulated by long and thorough training.

The door eventually opened. Three sets of booted feet — not those of children, nor those of men yet, either — sounded steadily on the floor. Other schoolboys might have raced away from their lessons; these did not. Still, the polished floor and walls rang with the voices of the young, the speakers’ breeding insufficient to disguise their relief entirely.

Katsuragi stepped into their path.

They came to a sudden halt. “Katsuragi- _dono,”_ the eldest, Akihiro, said respectfully. 

“Katsuragi- _san,”_ the other two said in near-unison.

Katsuragi smiled and nodded at each. “Akihiro- _kun,_ Fumio- _kun,_ Hideaki- _kun.”_

Akihiro frowned. His _genbuku_ had been held earlier that year, and Katsuragi had been in attendance.

“How go your history lessons with Ashley- _san?”_ Katsuragi continued.

“They go well, Katsuragi… _san,”_ Akihiro said hesitantly.

Katsuragi’s smile broadened. “What have you been learning?”

“All about the ancient empire of the West, Katsuragi- _san,”_ Fumio said excitedly.

“ _The_ ancient empire?” Katsuragi lifted a brow behind his spectacles. “There have been quite a few empires in the West, Fumio- _kun.”_

The second son’s cheeks colored. “It was the one based in the Sea Between the Continents, Katsuragi- _san._ The one that conquered nearly all of our own continent in its time.”

“Ah. That one. Yes, I can see how a mere schoolboy might have mistaken it for the only one that ever existed.”

Fumio dropped his eyes to the floor. 

“But…” Akihiro was frowning again. “It was a very splendid empire, Katsuragi- _san,_ and to this day it has left its mark all over. Its roads, its buildings, its language, the blood of its people.”

“But not in our country,” Katsuragi pointed out softly. “Nor in Eurote. Both nations were untouched by its ambitions, and the bones it left on the continent do not mean it yet lives. No more than the bones a man leaves in the earth mean he yet lives.”

The three boys stared up at him. He thought of rabbits, wide eyes caught in a hunter’s torch, despairing of escape. He rather liked that look on them. Yet he had greater game to chase.

“Ashley- _san_ is a most excellent tutor,” he said, eyeing each boy directly in turn. “As heirs to an esteemed Branch Family, you will, of course, learn to sift out from his lessons those foreign details which will make you well-rounded scions of your House from those which are, perhaps, corrosive to the essence of our country.”

Six eyes flickered anxiously at him. They had no idea what he was talking about, he was sure. It was all well. Perhaps one of the seeds would someday prove to have fallen on fertile ground. He let his smile return, broad and almost lazy. “I bid you all good day,” he said. “Akihiro- _kun,_ Fumio- _kun,_ Hideaki- _kun.”_

Something in Akihiro’s eyes flashed, yet he joined his brothers in the chorus of “Katsuragi- _san”_ as the three moved off down the corridor.

“Katsuragi.”

He looked up. Sunlight through window glass flashed golden in hair that, he knew from its feel between his fingers, required far too much pomade to tame its shagginess. Eyes flashed celestial blue from inside the classroom.

This time Katsuragi’s smile was entirely genuine, buoyed by the now-familiar rising heat and lightness in his body. The lack of a smile in return did nothing to defuse it. It would not be the first time he had overcome Ashley’s reluctance. Standing in the doorway, he bowed deeply to his old teacher: the picture of deferential, youthful humility, to any who could not see his face at the moment. Then he moved languidly into the classroom and shut the door gently behind him.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Ashley said softly.

“Why?” Ashley had addressed him in the Eastern language, but Katsuragi replied in Saxon, one of the tongues in which Ashley had instructed him. “Does our presence together profane this room in which innocents take their schooling?” Still smiling, he shrugged out of his coat and hung it neatly on the door peg. “You schooled me too, Ashley. May I no longer visit my old tutor and profess my…” He stepped closer. “….admiration for him?”

The blue eyes flickered sideways for the briefest moment before they bored into Katsuragi’s again. Ashley switched to yet another tongue, one no longer spoken on the continent except by scholars. “‘I have been indeed your master, but it was only to teach sin.’”

Katsuragi’s smile broadened. “This is a civilized nation, _mein Lehrer._ We are not in the habit of gelding teachers who take liberties with their charges. Especially once those charges have grown to manhood.”

“I am glad that you have retained at least some of your lessons.” The breathy quality of Ashley’s voice as he answered Saxon with Saxon was not conducive to the dry note he was attempting to strike. “However, I presume you are not here for additional instruction in centuries-old sordid affairs.”

“Of course not.” Katsuragi was just centimeters away now. “I am here in pursuit of a modern sordid affair.”

“Kats—”

The full name never left Ashley’s lips, not with Katsuragi’s mouth against them and Katsuragi’s hand fisted in the lapel of his coat. His efforts to free himself were fruitless, and not simply, Katsuragi thought, because Ashley was not the one with recent military training.

This time it took no more than five seconds before a moan fluttered in Ashley’s throat and he lay a palm on either side of Katsuragi’s face. His lips and jaw began to move, and Katsuragi let his own soften, slacken, admitting Ashley’s frantic tongue, meeting it with his own. He arched against his former tutor — still taller than he was, if not by much anymore — and turned his head slightly to chuckle at Ashley’s soft gasp, at the feel of the erection pressing into his own loins. “I like doing this to you,” he said, then hissed out his breath to feel broad hands spanning his buttocks, fingers denting deep into the hard-muscled flesh under his trousers.

“So. _Wo willst du mich?”_ he purred against Ashley’s ear. “On the table?”

“Good God, _no,”_ Ashley groaned, continuing to paw him.

Katsuragi snickered. “Worried that you’ll miss a drop of seed and one of the little _bocchan_ will find it during a lesson?”

“More worried that it might collapse beneath us.” Ashley had dropped his head to worry the side of Katsuragi’s neck with his teeth. “I shouldn’t like to explain that pile of costly matchsticks to Lord Tachibana.”

“Mm.” Katsuragi licked at his earlobe. “The window seat, then?”

Ashley tensed and lifted his head to stare through the pane. “And if we should be seen from below?”

“Nothing is yet in bloom. No one will be taking the air today from a seat on a cold stone bench.” Katsuragi untucked Ashley’s tie from his waistcoat and pulled on it to tug him closer again.

“Clothes off, lad,” Ashley whispered against his lips. “All of them.”

Katsuragi grinned. He bent and unlaced his shoes, then straightened and kicked them off while his slender fingers made short work of his fly buttons. His trousers and linens hit the floor with a soft thump, and he stepped neatly out of them. “And you?” he inquired, pulling off his stockings.

The blue eyes pinned him again as Ashley worked at his own fly. “Only the necessary bits today.”

“Unfair, _mein Lehrer,_ ” Katsuragi complained as he unbuttoned his waistcoat, then his shirt. He was too old now to resort to winsome calf-eyed pleas; he’d play dirty instead. “It’s not _only_ your cock I want. I want your arms, and your shoulders, and your chest, and your back, and your ass, and your thighs.”

Ashley flushed bright red against the gold of his hair, but he growled, “I see no reason to give you everything you want. Up on the seat. Heels apart.”

The schoolroom was furnished plainly, as suited its purpose, but not cheaply. It was not done among the Eight Branch Families to appoint their chambers meanly; it would have shamed their ancestors. Katsuragi was not sure what afforded him more pleasure: Ashley’s spit-slickened fingers beginning to play at his opening, or that he had his bare feet and buttocks planted on a cushion of tasar silk that, though only lightly worn and untouched by moths, must have been more than a hundred years old. He wondered as he arched up into Ashley’s touch whether Lord Tachibana ever visited this room to supervise his sons’ education, whether he seated himself on this very cushion.

House Katsuragi did, of course, outrank House Tachibana. Sparing a hum of approval for Ashley as the long, elegant fingers ignited sparks deep inside him, he imagined himself protesting indignantly to Lord Tachibana that the man should be _honored_ to have his costly cushion stained with Second Family seed. The crooking of Ashley’s forefinger turned his chuckle into a soft huff of pleasure.

“You’re ready,” Ashley declared. With his left hand under Katsuragi’s chin he bit at his mouth as if at a ripe pear; with his right he made a fist and slid his own prepuce back and forth over the solid and heavily veined stanchion of his cock. Then he was guiding it home, left arm looped behind Katsuragi’s right knee and under his thigh.

At the first thrust, the back of Katsuragi’s head knocked against the window pane, which rattled in its frame. He grunted, blinking away the scattering of sparks before his eyes. If the glass gave way and they fell two stories to the garden path below, would his ancestors be more receptive to his groveling apologies than his father would have been? Rather than ponder the question he shoved the heels of his hands down into the cushion, steadying himself for the next thrust.

But Ashley remained stilled inside him, right hand twisted into his hair. “ _This_ is what you wanted,” he accused, voice low and rough again. “To make me finger and fuck you like a _kagema_ rented for a few bits of silver. Make me wear away that smooth, smug façade of yours.” Katsuragi flushed, and his cock twitched between them. Even through the layers of clothing over his belly, Ashley evidently felt it; he smirked in triumph before drawing back to thrust anew. Katsuragi grunted again, bearing down, taking all of Ashley in before purposefully clenching around him.

“Oh, you’re good,” Ashley rumbled. “Then again you’ve a lot of practice at fucking people, haven’t you?” Another burst of mirth died in Katsuragi’s throat and was reborn a stuttered moan. His former tutor relinquished his grip on his hair to grab the left stem of Katsuragi’s spectacles and pry them from his face, then toss them to the far end of the window seat. “You don’t look so clever now,” he observed, then dragged Katsuragi’s head up by the hair again for another ruthless kiss. Katsuragi returned it with as little mercy, sucking hard on Ashley’s bottom lip before nipping it.

“Brat.” Ashley’s hand moved to Katsuragi’s left nipple and tweaked it hard. “There’s a bamboo cane in the rear closet,” he murmured in Katsuragi’s ear. “Lord Tachibana has given me leave to use it at my discretion. His sons have never earned such correction from me. You, on the other hand—” This time Katsuragi’s upper back struck the pane as well as the back of his head.

“You’d provoke me to have you deported?” Even while gasping, Katsuragi managed a tone of immense assuredness. “When you’ve nowhere to go, unless Eurote would stoop to take you in?”

Ashley was shuttling hard and fast in and out of him now. “You’d show your father… your welted ass, with all the questions… that’d raise?”

Katsuragi’s fingers clawed at the cushion as he raised his hips to meet Ashley’s. “I needn’t… tell him the entire truth… I am inventive…”

“‘Inventive.’” It was a huff of breath laced with scorn. “One way… to put it…” and then Ashley uttered no more words, just short rough groans. He dropped his right hand between the two of them, wrapping it around Katsuragi’s cock and working it savagely, bringing his former pupil off with a wrenching shudder as he himself spent hard inside him.

He pulled out almost immediately. Katsuragi, eyes closed and still panting, made a low whine of complaint. Something soft smacked into his bare chest, and he opened his eyes and looked down at the neatly folded square of cloth. 

“Clean yourself up before you get anything on that damned cushion,” Ashley ordered in the Eastern tongue, tending to his own groin with a second handkerchief.

Katsuragi smiled again, broad and lazy, keeping his heels apart as he made an extravagant show of dabbing at his own hole. “I am your obedient pupil, _sensei.”_ The curl of Ashley’s lower lip was a pleasant thing. Once leaking onto the cushion was no longer a worry, Katsuragi turned his attention to his rapidly shrinking cock, wincing a little at the touch of linen on the hypersensitized skin. “Does Lord Tachibana not pay you enough to afford silk handkerchiefs?”

And there it was, the heaven-colored glare that could quell a dozen unruly schoolboys at once. It had never quieted Katsuragi. Long before he was old enough to fully understand what it did to him, old enough to seek out Ashley in his rooms and pose a question having nothing to do with the day’s lesson, that look had always flowed hot and molten through his belly and loins. Sated now, he found that it gratified him in ways deeper than those of lust.

“Lord Tachibana is not a stingy man,” Ashley said stiffly as he rebuttoned his trousers, still glaring at Katsuragi. “But what spending money I have goes largely to books, that I might tutor his sons the better, and to clothes of a cut that make me presentable as a tutor. The luxurious indulgences afforded to scions of the Branch Families are, for better or for worse, out of my reach.”

Katsuragi scoffed, still smiling. “You think my existence is one of indulgence.”

The fair brows rose. “It’s late afternoon. I stand in the place I practice my profession, clothed for same. You sit naked and spraddle-legged on a silk cushion. Perhaps I was unfair in comparing you to a _kagema_ ; pleasure-boys actually work for a living.”

Katsuragi’s smile broadened further as he reached for his spectacles and resettled them on his nose. He had long trained himself to smile all the more brightly at insults to his honor; the reaction tended to discomfit the insulter, though of course that would not be true of Ashley. “You’ve just fucked me witless in the place of your profession, _sensei,_ where three innocent young boys looked to you for instruction not fifteen minutes ago. Whereas I am nowhere near my post; I was given leave for the day.”

Ashley frowned in puzzlement rather than umbrage. “Your post?”

“Ah, yes. We haven’t had a chance to speak in a few months, have we.” Katsuragi pushed himself off the cushion with both palms and retrieved his fallen trousers and linens. “I’ve completed my initial military training. By the grace of my ancestors and of my House, I have since attained the position of Staff Officer.”

“Congratulations,” Ashley said neutrally. His glare had abated somewhat.

Katsuragi’s smile was now a grin as he plucked his shirt up from the floor and shrugged it back on. “Many thanks, _sensei.”_

Ashley leaned against the table, arms folded, expression now guarded. “Now that you raise the issue of military matters. I’ve heard rumors,” he said, “of war drums beating in the West.”

His shirt buttoned, Katsuragi tucked it neatly into his trousers and picked up his waistcoat. “I am not at liberty to either confirm or deny those rumors.” He had quashed the grin; rattling off the boilerplate sentence seemed to have shifted him into officer mode. But he couldn’t deny the burst of spiteful, even (he’d admit it to himself) puerile joy that speaking it, denying knowledge to his teacher, gave him.

“Are you at liberty to tell me whether you’ll march off to war if the drums grow close enough?”

His fingers stilled on a button halfway up the closure of his waistcoat. The blue gaze suffused his chest with a warmth that had grown unfamiliar to him since childhood. Many catered to him, deferred to him; since the death of his older sister in childbed, he didn’t think any had worried for him.

“If I am ordered to, I will.” He was earnest about almost nothing in life, but now he said gravely, “This is my country, and I will die for it if commanded to. I am surprised you ask, _sensei._ I fully admit a lack of honor in many things, but not in this. Never in this.”

“Some of us,” Ashley said, “are capable of professing our care to the objects thereof.” He paused, holding Katsuragi’s eyes steadily. “Of course, some of us are capable of such care in the first place.”

The grin returned, a rictus. “And you think me otherwise.”

Ashley did not speak. Katsuragi had had no idea how deeply silence could cut into flesh.

“Ashley.” Earnest twice in one minute; a record, he thought. “I would have no difficulty finding other lovers, trust me. Yet I seek you out, again and again.” It was his turn to pause. “Why would I do that if not out of … care?”

Ashley’s mouth twisted. “Erotic obsession. The imbalance of power, the old thrill of your first corruption. And at the hands of an exotic foreigner, no doubt.”

 _Don’t project your own perversions onto me,_ sensei.

The words sat heavily on Katsuragi’s tongue, pushed against the insides of his lips. He sensed the bridge too far; he bit them back. It was not a strenuous task for one raised to the standards of the Eight Branch Families. He mused for a moment on the uses of silence. To cut another to the quick, or to protect him from the cut. Ashley had chosen the first, he himself the second, and to point out this demonstration of care for his old teacher would be to vitiate it.

Such a brief moment together, so layered with ironies.

The silence wore on, well past the point of awkwardness, past the point at which Katsuragi had put his stockings and shoes back on. He strode to the door to retrieve his coat.

“Katsuragi,” Ashley said quietly.

He turned, coat on but as yet unbuttoned, to regard his former teacher. The air of stern command with its blood-heating promise — _I will keep you in check, no matter how highborn you are_ — had ebbed entirely from Ashley’s expression. Katsuragi recalled that which he knew but seldom thought upon: that Ashley was his senior by merely five, perhaps six years at most.

“If you go off to war, come back alive and whole,” Ashley said in Saxon. “Even if it’s not me you choose to come back to.”

He was not so terrible, Katsuragi thought, that he would answer such a plea flippantly. It had nothing to do with how his throat had constricted, how the inside of it felt astringent and acid. For a second time that afternoon, he bowed deeply to his _sensei,_ but in this bow he dispensed with irony. The third time in less than five minutes, he noted.

As he straightened he caught Ashley’s eye, feeling the sky-colored gaze tear something inside his breast. He exited the classroom without speaking, shutting the door behind him far too hastily.

Trailed by his men, the Deputy Minister strides past high walls of evenly laid brick, broken here and there by an elegant mullioned window whose pebbled glass sparkles in the sunlight. Aesthetics from the West, not nearly as ancient as the verse he quoted.

Of course, the same can be said for his and his men’s own sartorial style. A muscle in his cheek twitches with the irony. It would be a bit late in the game — a few generations late in the game — for them to be showing up here in _kimono_ and _zori._ Or for all the grand Western edifices that have gone up across their country in the last six decades to be torn down, and buildings with curved roofs and portable walls raised in their places. (Wasteful, too, that latter idea.)

Yet the Deputy Minister cannot help but muse that while the Reizen winter residence may be well suited for this region’s climate and impressive as a military headquarters, that Reizen chose it for the latter purpose does not flatter the lie of his loyalty. Then again, this is the young man who at eighteen believed he had more military wisdom and instinct than did the late Emperor. Perhaps his loyalty is sound, his judgment less so.

All that said, his choice of knight does not speak well of either. And how he has chosen to deal with the newly arrived Euroteans has created considerable inconvenience for the Ministry of Home Affairs.

After so many centuries in bloom, the flowers are wilting, rotting, the winds scattering their fetid petals far from the decaying stems. To acknowledge this is, for the Deputy Minister, as bitter as gentian. He himself has come up from the same noble roots. But the garden must be tended. The choice is between letting it all die, the wind carrying even the loam away to nourish the soil of other countries… or transplantation, with all its vigor and all its vulgarity.

They hear the last heavy smacks of wood on wood just as they emerge into the courtyard. In the center of the expansive space stands the lord of the First of the Eight Branch Families, the Commander of the Left Imperial Guard, the nephew of the Emperor, the living avatar of the Shinka. He wears sparring robes, his _bokken_ is in his left hand, and the fingers of his right lie flat against the bandaged but otherwise naked back of the dog who kneels at his feet.

A polluted dog who obediently trots back to his supposedly forsaken countrymen, not to the man he names master, with sensitive papers in his maw.

_“Otō-sama,”_ Katsuragi said, ducking his head, keeping his expression neutral.

When his father did not reply, he dared a glance upward. The old man’s face was stone, his eyes not only as black as obsidian now but as hard. It didn’t necessarily portend anything serious, of course. Katsuragi dropped his gaze again and waited him out, looking deferentially expectant instead of bored without expending much effort on it.

With his head down he didn’t see the blow coming. His spectacles flew off his face as he staggered a few steps backward, cheekbone burning. A servant scurried out of some dim corner to gather them up for him.

“Let him pick them up himself,” his father snarled, lowering his arm. The servant retreated back into invisibility with alacrity and a nod.

The spectacles had fallen to no harm on the thick carpet. Katsuragi bent down and took the right earpiece between his fingers, replacing them on his nose as he straightened. His cheek smarted against the bottom of the left lens frame.

“I have sired a whore for an heir,” the old man said bitterly, and Katsuragi’s heart suddenly lurched inside a void of clenching, crushing cold.

“I… am not sure I understand, _Otō-sama,”_ he said softly, staring at the floor again. It hurt a bit to speak.

“Will you shame me further by lying to my face, boy? A gardener preparing one of the Tachibana gardens for spring heard a noise and spied your former tutor in an upstairs window, fornicating with a younger man. Consider yourself fortunate that the gardener does not condescend to gossip and therefore could not guess at the younger man’s identity. He brought the matter directly to Lord Tachibana, who most certainly _has_ heard the rumors, and he in turn sought me out privately.”

Katsuragi was silent. He supposed he should throw himself on the old man’s mercy, abase himself for having brought shame on his house and his ancestors, plead abjectly for forgiveness. He considered the mendacious arguments that perhaps Ashley had seduced Akihiro now, and that was the younger “man” the gardener had seen; or that perhaps another employee of House Tachibana was servicing the tutor as well as serving the family. He discarded them as, he decided, too patent in their mendacity.

“Your silence indicts you,” his father said finally.

“I have not the faintest idea whom Ashley- _sensei_ could have… been with,” Katsuragi said. “In fact, _Otō-sama,_ I am greatly ashamed for him, to hear this news of his indiscreet behavior.”

He held himself somewhat tensely, half expecting another blow. The silence this time stretched out as if across the whole of the continent.

Finally the words came. “A whore and a liar. All three Tachibana boys told their father they saw you in the hallway outside the schoolroom after their lessons that day. And it was shortly thereafter that the gardener witnessed that disgraceful show.”

Seconds passed in silence, became minutes. Katsuragi dared a look upward again. The old man’s eyes were closed, the muscles of his face tensed. With some shock Katsuragi realized how many more deep, severe lines had etched themselves into it since last they had met. The men of their House aged slowly and almost imperceptibly, a gift from their ancestors. But when Time demanded her due of their bodies, she did so swiftly and without remorse. And his father had not been young when Katsuragi was born.

After another long, long moment, he looked up again. His father had opened his eyes, and any illusion that age had sapped him of his steel fled at once.

“Tomorrow I will petition the Emperor to have him deported.”

Not often did panic strike those of the Branch Families. All were trained from birth to be masters, not slaves, to their emotions; to keep their heads about them, that they might command obedience all the more easily. For that was their place, to command: a lofty place around which others revolved and not the reverse; a place secured for them long before they had even been conceived. But now great massifs of ice pressed into Katsuragi’s viscera, forcing all air out of his lungs; his heart worked at twice its usual speed as if the effort alone could warm him again. When he spoke next, his voice was shamefully tight, nearly threatening to unbreak.

“ _Otō-sama._ I humbly beg that you not do this. Ashley- _sensei_ cannot return to his native land, nor to the lands of its new allies.”

“Did you think I didn’t know that, boy? He’s made his own bed in his homeland, just as he has here. Had he been continent enough to indulge in no more than a solitary lad of the lower orders from time to time, no one of importance would have batted an eye. But a man who leaves a trail of debauchery behind him made up of the children of nobles writes his own order of exile. I don’t blame the Westerners for summarily tossing him out and barring him re-entry under pain of death.”

“Where would you have him go, _Otō-sama?”_ Katsuragi pleaded.

The old man snorted. “It’s not my concern, nor yours. Perhaps he can forge his papers of reference again and find one last place in Eurote, and perhaps this time he’ll learn to keep his trousers buttoned. Or he can bend his back and work like a common man.”

The ensuing silence was shot through with Katsuragi’s shallow breaths as his mind raced, like a man’s open hand flailing for his sword as his door is battered down.

_…for his sword._

As the image, the idea, the plan took shape in his mind, a fire kindled itself in his breast. It was not the thought-addling heat ignited by a sky-colored gaze. Thought caught fire and blazed with brilliance in this roaring surge that withered fear and doubt and thawed great pathways through the massifs of ice.

_For my sword._

“I bend to your will, _Otō-sama,”_ Katsuragi murmured, his head still bowed. His voice no longer creaked; he schooled it to the sound of resignation. No need to give away that not only were his feet firm again on the playing board but that he had the force of initiative behind him.

_Katsuragi is twenty years old. He stands on a low dais in the largest of his father’s gardens, head held erect, his_ kanmuri _gleaming atop it. Under a voluminous robe the color of saffron he wears trousers made of damask and three_ kimono _. His_ daikyū _rests against his right side; his_ tachi _hangs at his left hip. Around him — to his south, north, west, east — stand four other men his age or slightly older. At his feet kneels a fifth._

 _Those of the Eight Branch Families blithely don or refrain from donning all manner of garb, never once considering the weather, only the suitability of the vestments. Katsuragi would have put on_ sokutai _even were the sun beating down on him like a hammer on an anvil. Yet he cannot help but feel that the chill of the air while both he and his knight-to-be swim in separate seas of bright fabric is a subtle nod from the gods, from his ancestors._

_It is no easy thing for a man to renounce his nationality. But that of the man on his knees has already been torn from him, lies tattered on the ground. Katsuragi ponders how much shorter a step it must be for such a man to give up the privileges of freedom, to become the possession of another — even if he first knew that other as a mere boy, even if he brought that boy the power of knowledge and, on occasion, the pain of discipline._

_Katsuragi looks down into irises that burn a pure blue. When he sees nothing but intense, unwavering devotion and determination in them, he feels something ease within his breast. He realizes he had dreaded to see in them fear, trepidation, or — worse — a pathetic, unmanly gratitude._

_He raises the lower tip of his_ daikyū _. Ashley takes that end of the longbow in both his robe-shrouded hands and presses his lips to it. Ghosts of that kiss echo up and down Katsuragi’s body: the touch of Ashley’s lips, his tongue, his teeth. Katsuragi’s color does not even rise as he deftly turns his mind away from its memories of the night before and lowers the bow once again._

 _Now he takes his_ tachi _from its scabbard, as he has not done since his_ genbuku _, and with his left arm he drives the naked tip into the barely warmed earth. The scabbard is a work of art in and of itself: intricate symbols wrought in gold on the hilt, the starlike glitter of_ nashiji _, the luminescent gleam of mother-of-pearl, the elegant tasseling. But, appreciate as Katsuragi does the elaborate in his aesthetics, the scabbard cannot compare to the naked blade._

 _This is an age in which ugly things — rifles, bombs, tanks, canisters of gas — put violent mass death into the hands of common men. The sword at Katsuragi’s left hip and the bow at his right hand are lovely and lethal in their simplicity. The_ tachi _represents a raw power once arrogated to royalty and nobility alone, a power mastered only after years of practice._

_Ashley’s hands emerge from the edges of the robe, evoking yet more ghosts of pleasure. In his right hand he takes up the tassel from the hilt, wraps it around his knuckles, and presses his lips to it. Katsuragi drops his left hand from the planted sword and holds it out, and Ashley takes it in both hands. For a third time, he lowers his lips, and this time heat does rise in Katsuragi’s cheeks. He decides not to worry that his witnesses see it, for they are (reasonably) trustworthy men. He does not at all worry that Ashley sees it, for Ashley, now, is his._

_“Do you understand, Ashley,” he asks, just loudly enough to be heard by the others, “what it means to be a knight?”_

_“I do, my lord,” Ashley murmurs against the backs of Katsuragi’s fingers, no more or less audible than is his new master, his eyes lowered humbly. “My country, my family, all my rights as a man: I renounce them gladly. I bind myself to obey your every command. I am your sword, serving you and only you, with no ends of my own.”_

_Katsuragi gently slips his hand from Ashley’s grasp and lays it atop his head. The sensation that radiates from his palm throughout the rest of his body is not erotic; it is something even more primal. He has, many times in his short life, felt reverence, but he does not recall the last time he has experienced awe. His throat feels tight and thick as he whispers, “Raise your head.”_

_Ashley obeys, and Katsuragi knows at once from his eyes that he has felt it, too._

_Commanding that heaven-blue gaze, losing himself in it, he recites, “As your liege lord, I take you under my protection. No one may lay a hand on you without my say. But, as your liege lord, I hold your destiny in my hands. And I will ask of you many things, perhaps impossible things, all of which you must do. If you fail, you must bear the burdens of your failure… whether success was possible or not.” He pauses. “This is no small thing to ask a man. I give you one last chance to reconsider.”_

_“I will not reconsider,” Ashley says vehemently, not even waiting until the breath has died on Katsuragi’s lips. “I am your knight unto death, and I swear it upon my name, which is all I shall retain for my own in this world. I pray you, charge me with duty as you see fit … my master.”_

_Under layers of damask and silk, Katsuragi shivers. His witnesses may not have seen his hand tremble on Ashley’s head, but it is impossible that Ashley has not felt it._

_“It is done,” he murmurs, and six soft breaths of relief mingle in the crisp air. They have no sooner dissipated amid the pervasive scents of _sugi_ and damp earth newly touched by sun than heavy footfalls, punctuated by the thump of a cane, echo down the main path._

_“What is the meaning of this display?” his father thunders. “What does this debauched foreigner still do on my land?”_

_Katsuragi smiles broadly and bows to the old man, putting precisely the amount of mockery into the gesture that will barely skirt the bounds of propriety._ “Otō-sama,” _he says triumphantly. “You have arrived at a most opportune moment, for I have just invested Ashley as my knight.”_

House Reizen, the Deputy Minister knows — everyone knows — is of a lineage unbroken since the gods walked the earth. The scion of each generation is a savage blossom, a rose whose petals are reddened with blood, an efflorescence of immense might. He abstains from meat, from alcohol, from dishonorable conduct in the field, from carnal pleasures, even sometimes from marriage that he might remain pure. In this purity lies his power, a power that allows a stripling of twenty years to command a force of twenty thousand. In their eyes and those of countless civilians, he is their savior.

Were that purity to be lost, tainted, all such power would drain away from him, along with his very place in the world. He would fall lower than a clod-digger, lower than a brigand, lower than the meanest whore. Death would be preferable to this state of existence.

Yet now the hand of this supposed avatar of purity moves from the laughably insufficient barrier of the bandages on his dog’s back, up to the bare broad forehead, before the faithless beast himself catches it up in his enormous, unclean paw and puts his muzzle to it.

The Deputy Minister has read of another flower, in a book of the natural sciences that he inherited from his esteemed tutor. A sort of massive lily, standing three meters high, that grows in wet and steaming lands far to the southeast. Seldom, not for years, does it bloom, and then only at night. Carrion beetles and flesh-flies are its pollinators, and it lures them with a fragrance that is the stench of a bloated corpse: a feculent and sickly-sweetish bouquet of rotting fish, rancid sweat, poisonous tars, spoiled fruit, and a vile-smelling cheese that is greatly prized in Saxony.

He is reminded of this foreign blossom, with its fetor that suggests corruption far beyond what could be contracted from the unclean land, as he stands inside the courtyard’s border of rosebushes and smiles blandly at Reizen and his dog.

“My, my,” he says. “I made such an effort to attend, and the show’s already over? Seems you’re as soft on your dog as ever.”

He turns again to catch the beast staring at him, taking him in from under sweaty yellow bangs. The anger in the golden eyes has been banked. Now at the forefront are calculation and, yes, an element of fascination.

Before either of them can speak, a familiar voice, in a familiar tone of affront, rings out behind the Deputy Minister: “This is an outrage!”

Ah, yes. Grand Chamberlain Hasebe. Another dog, merely one on a heavier chain, less defiled, and (perhaps, slightly) less mad.

“Regardless of how high your own rank is,” the chamberlain fumes, “trespassing like this on the territory of the First of the Branch Families, taking our military police into custody without alerting us… this is not acceptable!”

The Deputy Minister, who has pivoted still smiling to regard him, murmurs, “As devoted to your duty as ever, I see. It’s commendable… but, Reizen- _dono,_ I wonder if it truly redounds to your benefit?”

He exchanges another long look with the dog, whose expression suggests a wish to tear out the Deputy Minister’s throat with his teeth.

At last, Reizen speaks. “Katsuragi- _dono.”_ There is steel in his voice. “My chamberlain has the right of it. You are a fellow scion of the Branch Families; as such, I request that you please show a little restraint.”

The Deputy Minister is only half-listening, for the golden eyes are drawing him forward like lodestones. Other voices drone, and bodies shift, all about them. An alarmed-looking young man in sparring robes sprints protectively toward Reizen and the dog. Hasebe bleats a query. The dog rests his filthy paw on his supposed master’s shoulder and utters an instruction. For how long has the beast given orders to the man?

Within an eye’s blink the Deputy Minister has come to stand within a few centimeters of the dog. He presses his trilby to his chest with feigned respect. He does not, now, smile.

A bit of the madness is back in the dog’s eyes. Quietly and in his own tongue he says, does not ask, “Isn’t your errand here to do with me.”

“Captain…?” the young man whispers, looking even more horrified.

“Watch your mouth, you!” Oe shouts.

The Deputy Minister ignores them both. Finding his smile again, though his brows remain drawn, he hums thoughtfully and asks, also in Saxon, “Now, why would you think that?”

The dog’s expression grows… thoughtful. Not a word the Deputy Minister would have associated with him, though he knows he is not facing down a fool.

“I smell my own kind on you,” says the dog.

Time stops. An abyss opens in the middle of the Deputy Minister’s chest.

_He sees a fair-haired man in gentleman’s clothing, bending at the waist, holding out his right hand to make the acquaintance of his new charge, wisteria petals drifting down around him…_

_He sees a fair-haired man in a billowing golden robe, kneeling, holding out right his hand to wrap it in the tassel of his master’s blade, pressing his lips to it…_

_He sees a fair-haired man in fatigues, helmet knocked askew, sinking to his knees, holding out his right hand while his left pulls a knife out of his belly; he stares at it in surprise and incomprehension before his eyes go blank and he crumples…_

_Katsuragi is twenty-one years old. He kneels in mud between a stand of_ sugi _and a stream, head bent forward, flecks of blood and viscera and fecal matter flying and spattering all around him._

_A soldier lies bound and writhing before him. Flesh-flies drone all about them. Gunfire and aeroplane motors resound in the far distance. They two are isolated, such that the man’s screams go unheard._

_A third man lies face-down several meters away, a_ tantō _hilt in his loosely curled right hand. It is difficult, now and from this distance, to discern the churned-up black soil beneath him from the blood that initially pooled under his torso._

_In retrospect, it seems to have been inevitable._

_There was no surprise in his father’s demand that the newly dubbed knight prove himself militarily. A knight, after all, wields a sword, not a bamboo cane. Fortunately there are advantages to knowing (reasonably) trustworthy men, men whose uncomfortable secrets one also knows, in positions of authority in the training camp._

_The surprise turned out to be how well a man of letters more than ten years older than most raw recruits adapted to the rigors and privations of army life._

_“The energy you obtain from fucking the younger recruits must be what enables you to bear up,” Katsuragi remarked in Saxon one night several months later. The laziness in his voice was only half feigned. They lay side by side on their backs, slicked with sweat, not touching at all. No breeze came through the open window to stir the curtains._

_After a brief silence came the reply in the Eastern tongue, its languor likewise half deceptive. “I no longer have Lord Tachibana’s cane at my disposal. You may wish to consider, however, that I have considerably more strength in my arms than once I did.”_

_“Legs, too. And hips._ Es ist sehr schön, _actually.”_

_Rather than reply, Ashley sat up and grabbed a handkerchief — linen again — from the nightstand and attended without hurry to the stickiness at his groin. Once done, he replaced the soiled cloth on the stand and turned to regard Katsuragi. The shadows made opaque black pools of his eyes._

_“I would understand if you did not believe me,” he said evenly, now speaking Saxon. “But, for a few years now, even during the times we were apart, there has been no one but you.”_

_Katsuragi regarded him without expression. In the dim, one could not adequately appreciate how sun and wind had burnished the fair face and roughened the elegant hands. But enough moonlight filtered through the curtains that one could note the greater breadth of Ashley’s shoulders, the muscles newly cording his arms, the hardened planes that had appeared on his chest, the ridges on his belly._ I’d have knighted you ages ago if I’d known what a god it would make of you, _Katsuragi had murmured a few nights before, lips saluting each ridge before his head descended between thighs that strained with newfound muscle._

_In the end, his reply was to brush the tips of two fingers over the back of Ashley’s hand. He felt a calloused thumb rise to meet them, softly and indolently, before their hands fell back to the damp sheet and they let themselves drift into sweltering dreams._

_Not long afterward, the war drums began to resound through the Eastern Country. Katsuragi learned quickly that it is one thing to spread a wing of protection over a soldier on the proving grounds, quite another to do so in the physical and moral maelstrom of actual war. Especially in one’s first actual war._

_Though Katsuragi is a fit and reasonably capable soldier, he attained the rank of Staff Officer by the grace of his ancestors and of his House — certainly not by the grace of his prowess in battle. Of course, that is the nature of most such promotions. That said, he is infinitely patient, keenly observant, quick of thought, and of reliable memory: an excellent choice for reconnaissance missions. The same goes without saying for Ashley, though the privileges of rank would have permitted Katsuragi to take on an utter idiot as one of his two subordinates had he so desired._

_In the heat of last summer, master and knight dozed fitfully side by side on costly linen sheets. In the heat of this one, they and their fellow scout, a man who wears the insignia of House Reizen, take turns sleeping lightly but adequately in thickets and hollows and on high tree limbs. The need for continual alertness is not conducive to erotic diversions. Nor is the near-inability to wash._

_Katsuragi is studying a clearing through binoculars when Ashley alights beside him on the same_ sugi _branch. Though they and the other scout have seen no one else for more than a day, Ashley does not whisper, “Going for more water”; rather, he presses two fingers lightly against the back of Katsuragi’s shoulder. Katsuragi acknowledges him with the most imperceptible of nods, not breaking his focus on the distant patch of land. He hears Ashley slip down from the tree, toward the stream, with so little sound that one must be trained to distinguish it from the softest of breezes stirring the needles._

_It is that training which tells Katsuragi almost immediately that something is wrong, that Ashley may never make it to the stream. His neck has grown so stiff that the crackle as he turns his head to the right is alarmingly loud. His alarm, however, is already fully ignited by a glimpse of his knight sinking amid a welter of other Eastern Country uniforms, each emblazoned with the badge of House Reizen._

_He does not think, simply acts. He leaps to a lower branch, then shimmies down the trunk, letting the rough bark punish the palms of his leather gloves. His boots thump on the dirt and he is running — and the cowards, the third scout and three collaborators, are fleeing, one to each wind. Meanwhile Ashley, swaying on his knees, stares downward in bewilderment as he palms the treacherous_ tantō _hilt protruding from his abdomen._

_Katsuragi knows there will be no help for him. Not out here, far from any field hospital and where all other men are enemies, whatever uniforms they wear. He suspects the last moments of his knight’s life should be spent with his shaggy blond head cradled in his master’s lap, their right hands clasped, Katsuragi murmuring the infinitely gentle things that one is supposed to say in so dire and final a situation, things that only such a situation could dredge up out of his depths._

_Could, in theory. Not even in his marrow rests a single drop of comfort to spare for Ashley. His vision is narrowing, his chest hollowing out, as if he is becoming the shaft of an arrow or the barrel of a gun. What he has to spare is retribution._

_Katsuragi’s eyesight may be imperfect, but his hands are remarkably steady. With precisely one bullet each, to the back of the head or neck, he takes down three of the assassins. The fourth, the one closest to him, he drops with blows of the rifle barrel to the man’s kidneys and across the backs of his knees, then rolls him over onto his back. His quarry is not the third scout, which is something of a pity._

_“Answers, if you want to keep your balls,” he snarls, his gloved fist in the man’s hair,_ tantō _at his throat, knee thrust into the vulnerable concavity below his ribcage. The man wheezes, eyes bulging, face draining. Katsuragi lifts his knee. The wretch trembles and has turned a greyish white, but his mouth has tightened into a hard line that emits no words._

_“Suit yourself.” Katsuragi replants his knee in the soldier’s midsection, cuts a strip off the man's jacket, flips him back over onto his face, and holds him down with his knee in the small of his back. The man flails, but Katsuragi has little trouble grabbing his wrists and binding them. He rises just high enough to kick the bastard back over, then drops to straddle him and tear off a second strip. That one goes around his ankles as Katsuragi sits on his hips to contain him._

_“Know what?” The_ tantō _rips a straight line down and through jacket, shirt, and undershirt, roughly from collarbone to navel, baring the pale, flat belly. “You can keep your balls. I want your intestines. Talk to me, and I’ll let you die with them in place.”_

_The soldier’s pallor takes on a hint of green. His voice cracking, he pleads, “You would desecrate me so, Katsuragi-_ sama? _On sacred land? For obedience to my superiors?”_

_A cold bolt of certainty — not that he’s content with it as proof — goes through Katsuragi at those last words. “This land is sacred to House Reizen, private, not to me,” he says. “And you’ve just murdered my knight. I’m afraid you’ll have to take whatever mercy I feel like giving you.”_

_He does not elaborate that he has no mercy in reserve. Nor does he mention that he does not intend to honor the promise he made the soldier earlier._

_For the next twenty minutes he works steadily and diligently within the horizontal aperture created in the man’s belly with one expert slash of his_ tantō _. He is learning to continue breathing through his nose, no matter how horrifying the stench. He is learning to ignore the dirge made by the wings of flies, to suffer the befouling tickle of their feet on his skin where another’s vital fluids have splashed him. He pulls that which he wants to know out of the soldier as if the information were bound up in the long, wet eel of flesh in his hands, shining pale purple and grey under its viscous coat of dark red._

_Another ten minutes pass, he guesses. Time does not flow linearly in battle but warps and bulges, barely shifting here, racing like an undammed river there. It’s not important. He has the information he was seeking. His own father. The Second Imperial Princess. Four common soldiers able to keep a secret… well, three._

_The soldier has barely enough function left in his abdominal muscles to enable him to gasp, “Please… my lord… kill me.” His abdomen is a wet red pit in which slimy loops of bowel shimmer and heave; flies crawl in and out of it at their leisure. From hips to mid-thigh his trousers are slickly saturated with a dark reddish-brown effluence._

_Katsuragi looks down at him. He is a worm in human form. An assassin and a coward who shows fear at the mere suggestion of harsh interrogation. On the other hand, he was following the orders of his House to the letter. And his testimony has been, without question, most valuable._

_Katsuragi smiles his easy, neutral smile._

_The_ tantō, _point down against the bare skin over the man’s heart, makes one last wet-sounding plunge. A final plume of blood rises out of the near-corpse. The man’s eyes roll back in his head, and his trembling ceases._

_Katsuragi stands and steps over the remains, then walks several meters and drops again to his knees. Ashley’s body is yet limp and loose as he turns it over. Flies, not satisfied with the generous offering of the assassin’s innards, swarm Ashley’s gut wound. Katsuragi does not so much swat as lash out at them with one arm, as if all of them sat on the_ tantō _’s hilt and helped drive it home._

_The eyes that stare up at the heavens are no longer heaven colored. Katsuragi has seen eyes of the darkest brown, even black, grow pallid in death; they have not prepared him to see Ashley’s eyes turned the watery grey of fog, becoming less distinguishable by the second from the sclera around them. The inner walls of his throat draw together as with a fingertip he gently pulls down one lid, then the other. The tiniest of shrouds, the only ones he can provide his teacher, his lover, his knight._

_His inner organs are formed of ice, floating in icy waters. It is not the ice of fear, as in his father’s study. There will be no savage blast of hope to thaw it, not ever._

_What there will be is retribution._

_Katsuragi rises again, turns, and walks about eight kilometers to the east. The foliage is luxurious along the first half of his journey. Ferns brush against his muck-soaked trouser legs, springing away with dots of blood and shit on their fronds. He crushes flowers underfoot whose names he doesn’t know; they release thin, tremulous wafts of fragrance that die almost instantly in the miasma he trails behind him._

_Eventually he emerges into higher terrain — House Tachibana territory, if his mental map is correct — whose flora cannot compare in lushness to those of the lowlands behind him. But it’s summertime, so the blossoms are nonetheless bright and lively, the grass thick and green-smelling, the scent of_ sugi _floating atop all the others._

_By the time he reaches the Tachibana command post, the sun has just begun to cant downward in the sky. It is only a few weeks after the solstice; the descent will be long and leisurely, infusing the_ sugi _above him and the dense grass below him with honey-like light for hours._

_He summons subordinates, not his own, then fellow officers. The tale he has been slotting together all afternoon spills effortlessly from his lips. Faces initially creased with horror and concern harden with anger and resolve. Telegrams are sent, telephone calls placed, orders issued._

_One long and scalding shower, one fresh change of clothes, and one light meal later, Katsuragi steps out into an early summer evening awhir with crickets and leans against the brick of the building. It is a stalwart, practical, ugly chunk of Western architecture. Between his fingers is a cigar he cadged from Colonel Tachibana. Another Western import. Far Western, an ocean beyond Saxony and its allies. For reasons of both health and vanity, he’s tried not to develop too keen a taste for tobacco, but the rush of rich smoke into his lungs leaves his nerves both soothed and honed in a way he does not know how to otherwise effect._

_He stands in contemplation and a wreath of smoke for perhaps forty-five minutes. The shadow of the command post lengthens past him, eating into the honey-like light that drenches nearly everything else around. Eventually he hears, far above, the engine of the first bomber. He stubs out the cigar, burnt down well past its last bit of usefulness, against the brick wall and flicks what remains into the dirt._

_All his life, he thinks, he has wished to serve his country, preserve its essence, honor its gods. He argues with himself that the land to which the bombers fly is merely that of House Reizen. No other house is bound to revere its founder, buried in the lush lowlands where Katsuragi disemboweled one Reizen soldier and shot down three more._

_He is and has always been a superb liar, but one distinct factor in the success of his ambitions thus far has been his pitiless refusal to lie to himself. He cannot diminish his comprehension that, by his own hand and by his command, he has befouled the final resting place of gods — those of his nation and those of other nations — as thoroughly as the soldier he gutted befouled his own trousers. He has done this out of love for a foreign debaucher, one who injected foreign ideas into raw green minds and foreign seed into raw green bodies. One who could be saved from a disgrace of his own making only by throwing away what little of his life remained to be thrown away._

_I have made a shell of my honor, _he thinks._ I have hollowed out my House. I have emptied out my name._

_The bombers tear westward through the deepening indigo of the sky. Far below, the scion of House Katsuragi does not see them, for he has closed his eyes behind his spectacles._ At least, _he thinks,_ I never promised to come back alive and whole. _And, as bitter as gentian, he begins to laugh._

The first note of laughter from the Deputy Minister’s mouth is forced, but before long he is throwing his head back, laughing uproariously, smiling with genuine mirth.

“I had thought,” he says at last, “that the dog our precious Shinka chose for his knight would have a slightly better pedigree. Instead, unexpectedly, you seem to be feral.”

“Minister Katsuragi, sir!” a new voice calls out from behind him.

“Major Uemura,” he replies evenly, watching the officer stride to a smart stop a few meters away.

“You have,” Uemura states at a volume and with a thunderous mien that belie his next words, “my sincerest apologies that, due to the sudden nature of your visit, I was unable to give you a proper welcome. If I may ask your indulgence to wait just a bit longer, please allow me to show you to a suitable area in the main building… until the illustrious head of our household can dress for this occasion.”

A most clever and capable man, the Deputy Minister must grudgingly admit. He cannot imagine why Uemura is not Grand Chamberlain in this house, rather than the native dog. He turns to the foreign dog again with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Ah, he’s spoiled all the fun. Let’s call this one a draw.”

“Katsuragi- _dono,”_ Reizen says sharply. “I wish to make it clear that from the outset, I shall evade nothing. Whatever questions you wish to look into, I shall do everything in my power to answer.” He pauses. “However, I do wish to ask: Has it occurred to you that you would not need to resort to underhanded tactics if you knew how to get information out of people without mocking them?”

For a long minute the courtyard is deadly silent.

It’s the Deputy Minister who breaks the silence. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re as humorless as you’ve always been.” He turns, waving his trilby in dismissal, though he’s the one striding from the courtyard. “Fine. We’ll speak again later.”

Just before he and his men retrace their steps through the rosebushes, Uemura behind them, he turns once more to face Reizen and his dog. _What did Ashley say this was called…?_

“And when we do speak, I expect you to tell me all your reasons for appointing that… man your knight.”

_…ah, yes. A Parthian shot._

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Undomielregina. :)
> 
> As complex, indirect, and nonlinear (not to mention incomplete) as it is, _Maiden Rose_ is a challenging canon to write in. I have read it through twice now, with some additional revisiting of specific page ranges or individual pages, and I can say for sure that there is much I am still missing. Therefore, I would like to praise three fellow fans with a great deal more familiarity with the canon than I have for the invaluable help they have given me with this fic.
> 
> First and foremost, I would like to thank [InevitableWeBreathe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/inevitablewebreathe) for her terrific and prompt beta work, especially on canon timeline and issues of fic continuity. Additionally, [Smillaraaq](http://archiveofourown.org/users/smillaraaq) freely offered comprehensive advice on the nuances of Japanese honorifics, specifics of Japanese culture, and other matters. Finally, [CordialCount](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount) provided a wonderful initial sounding board when this fic was taking shape, as well as some clarity about canon events and their implications.
> 
> Owing to the character limits of the Author's Notes text field on AO3, [on my LiveJournal](http://island-of-reil.livejournal.com/39585.html) I’ve provided a glossary of cultural references, Japanese words and phrases, and a few other possibly obscure allusions in the order in which they appear in the fic.


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